America First? Should the US intervene militarily in foreign conflicts?

President Trump was elected in part on his promise to avoid military engagements overseas, but his first months in office have shown – with strikes against the Assad regime in Syria, tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program and a much-discussed visit to the Middle East – that isolationism is not necessarily possible.

The debate over when the US should intervene militarily in foreign countries dates back more than a century. We list three reasons for intervention and three against, focusing on cases in which there is no direct and immediate threat to US security.

The US should not get involved in foreign countries

Intervention rarely benefits the US

The last large-scale US intervention came in 2003, when American forces overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and began an eight-year occupation. That war cost the US more than $2 trillion and the lives of nearly 4,500 American soldiers.

When it comes to American wars of choice, the Iraq experience is no outlier. Though the US is capable of defeating any enemy, the cost of doing so in both human lives and money is usually far greater than anticipated. Wars like Iraq and Vietnam, which saw nearly 60,000 American soldiers killed, are a case in point. But even smaller scale interventions like President Clinton’s 1993 mission in Somalia or the overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 have had unintended consequences.

When core US interests, such as the security of its citizens, are at stake, Americans may have no choice but to bear these consequences. But more often, the consequences of military action outweigh the benefits.

And it rarely benefits the country of the intervention

From the invasion of Hawaii in 1893 to the bombing of Syria in 2017, it is the norm for US intervention to be justified on humanitarian grounds. In some cases, this may truly be the motive. But rarely does military action improve the lives of ordinary citizens.

The US mission in Libya was aimed at stopping a civilian massacre by the government. It may have done just that, but Gadhafi’s overthrow has led to civil war and chaos in the country, with ISIS gaining a foothold. Post-occupation Iraq looks no better, while Afghanistan remains unstable 16 years after the US invasion. And if we go back a generation, wars in Southeast Asia devastated the region while bringing little benefit to its people.

America should not be the world’s police

Beyond weighing the pros and cons of each intervention, supporters of US action overseas must answer a broader question: when does a country have the right to intervene in another country?

The UN Charter, signed after World War II, requires authorization from the UN Security Council to use force. Respecting an internationalized body’s authority to decide on such issues is preferable to allowing any one country to act alone. And American foreign adventures make it more difficult for the US to criticize aggression by other powers, such as Russia’s invasions of Crimea and Georgia over the past decade or Iran’s involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

America can be a force for good

Inaction also has consequences

Too often, US military action is judged against a perfect alternative. But even if intervention has its drawbacks and complications, failing to act often carries an even steeper price.

Avoiding confrontation sometimes puts American citizens at risk. President Clinton had the chance to kill Osama bin Laden several times but did not pull the trigger. A strike that killed al Qaeda’s leader but resulted in civilian casualties may have earned criticism – indeed, it may have ended up in the other half of this column – but could have prevented the 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 and avoided a wider war in Afghanistan.

Any then there are the humanitarian costs of inaction. Clinton called his failure to stop a genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were killed in just two months, one of his biggest regrets. It may be a matter of time before President Obama says the same thing about Syria, where close to half a million people have been killed since 2011.

Intervention sometimes helps

Opponents of US intervention often point to cases in which American forces arguably made the situation worse. But Americans have also fought to prevent genocides, dethrone brutal dictators and uphold global norms.

In 1991, Operation Desert Storm prevented Saddam’s permanent annexation of Kuwait, an act that if let stand would have encouraged any dictator to snatch up smaller neighbors without fear of consequence. In 1995, NATO’s campaign in Bosnia following massacres in Srebrenica and Markale brought Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table, leading to the Dayton Peace Accord. US forces left a decade later without a single American killed by enemy fire. Even in Afghanistan, American intervention freed the population from the repressive rule of the Taliban.

The alternative is worse

It may be nice to imagine a world in which differences between nations are resolved only through diplomacy. But were the US to take a step on the international stage, it would not be the UN that would fill the void. Russia and China, both countries less committed to humanitarian ideals than the US, would step in. We need only to look back at the last time another superpower – the Soviet Union – challenged the US for global supremacy; only because of US protection was Western Europe able to thrive without falling to the grasp of Soviet tentacles. Meanwhile, regional hegemons like Iran would be free to impose their will on smaller nations without the credible threat of force from the US.

Bottom Line : US intervention overseas is never ideal and rarely uncomplicated, but nor are the alternatives. With great power comes great responsibility, which means the US will have to confront this question as long as it remains a world superpower. If you had the job and given the threats from N. Korea, Syria and Iran, what would you do?